GAMING Games and sports as cultural industries Games and social identities Gaming as environment Gaming as ritual

Games and the Production of Culture Producer-consumer relations and the professionalization of games Professional team sport as popular culture Professional sports & national politics Consumers in the production of professional sports

Professionalization as social and cultural process Organization and regulation –Conscious grouping –Criteria for membership –Expertise & expert systems –Distinctions – amateur, professional, fan –Forms of association Roles and status –Assigned tasks and activities –distinguished by varying degrees of prestige –models for organizing attitudes and behavior of individuals in relation to other statuses and roles

Regimes of value Goods and services produced and consumed circulate regimes of value (Appadurai) Prestige group, class, and taste/demand/consumption (Bourdieu) The social life of things (Appadurai)

Games and social identities person as agent within a sociomoral order a roster of interconnected agentive capacities supposed to characterize a person or class of persons array of social kinds recognized in the society publicly bestowed, imputed, and enunciated agentive capacities of persons the relations among those capacities.

Ritual repetitive: innovation not tolerated sequential: amen is at the end non-ordinary: marked in time or space “powerful”: power to change the world –by intervention of supernatural entities transformation of the participant Reinforce social bonds ritual is also a way a society remembers

Ritual (Practice) belief& practice-"a group's ethos is rendered intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life... rendered emotionally convincing by being presented as an image of the actual state of affairs...” (Geertz) ritual is a vital element in the processes that make and remake social facts and collective identities everywhere (Comaroff & Comaroff)

Gaming as environment Environment and simulation –A working representation of reality for the purpose of learning by doing –Artificial worlds of activity that mirror reality Transformation of reality – Play – play is a frame - a boundary around certain behaviors that signals play –play is meta-communication –without play no awareness of alternative realities, sets of rules, social orders

Gamings a form of play embedded to a far greater degree in the prevailing social order a component of culture, ritually patterned, gamelike provides mechanisms for building political unity and allegiance to the nation paradoxically reinforces social cleavages while transcending them, joins together some domains and separates others –worldwide dissemination of mass culture, re-emergence of nationalism and of racial and religious hostilities